Total War: Warhammer II - FFA / Avatar Conquest Discussion with Indypride

Hey, what's up guys? I am Oakley and I'm here with IndiePride. Hey, what's going on guys? And we're going to be discussing Warhammer 2 Multiplayer. This video is broken up into three different parts. The first part is just going to be discussing one of the big announcements that they're making with regards to multiplayer for Warhammer 2. So part one is just announcing what we know. Part two is going to be discussing speculation about that specific feature and what's sensible in terms of improvements. And then part three is going to be looking further ahead in the grand scope of the series talking more about the evolution of multiplayer over time. So that's kind of the scope of the video. Let's go ahead and dive into the announcement itself. Indie, I'll let you take this one. Okay, so basically when Oakley, myself, and PixelatedApollo went to Los Angeles with a bunch of other YouTubers, we interviewed Creative Assembly. And one of the questions we talked about when we were discussing Total War Warhammer 2 with Sam Millen, Al Beckham, and Andy Hall, three of the employees at Creative Assembly, was about multiplayer. Obviously, Oakley and myself are very big multiplayer YouTubers. That's what we focus on. That's what we really enjoy playing. So one of the things we asked was, are we going to be getting free-for-all or avatar conquest in Total War Warhammer 2? And we got a really big announcement from Sam Millen, who effectively told us, yes, we would be getting free-for-all in Total War Warhammer 2, which is really big. We've been asking for something like this for a very long time. I believe Medieval 2, back in 2006, was the last time we've had free-for-all in a Total War game. So, pretty big deal there. Huge announcement. Going to make a lot of people very happy. But what he said was, effectively, they want to put their toe in the water for multiplayer here, adding in free-for-all, see what the feedback is, see if the community supports it and gets behind it. And going from there, because it's a trilogy of games, they would look into the future, possibly adding more content, more features to multiplayer. It was super non-committal, the way he said it. Definitely PR speak there. Definitely go check out the interview if you haven't already. But effectively, that's what he was saying. He's saying that if the community can get behind it, if there's a big outcry and a big support for free-for-all when it comes out and people are playing it and supporting it, then we might get additional features somewhere down the line. What that means, we don't know specifically, but obviously Oakley and I have our own ideas about what that entails. We played Shogun 2. Some of you guys have as well. Avatar Conquest is probably the endgame here, what we would love to see eventually return. So, yeah, sticking to the first one, which is just bare bones, what did they announce? Well, Indy and I, as of recording this, don't quite know anything besides what was just stated to us in that interview. It may be the case that in the next couple days of you listening to this live, more information may come out. But at the time of us hearing about that, what they did announce was free-for-all is making a comeback and there's going to be some form of scored resolution to determine the winner of the match as opposed to last man standing. And that, like IndyPride said, this is them limiting their scope for now, but they very much expect to be able to do more in the future. So that's it for what has been announced and confirmed thus far. We can now pivot to the second part of this video is, hey, if free-for-all is announced, what are the likely things that they can do to improve that or what might be coming down the pipeline? So this would be short-term improvements to multiplayer, and then later on we'll talk about long-term evolution, like IndyPride said, heading towards Avatar Conquest. So in terms of improvements, Indy and I were discussing a bit before this video what are the things that they could do. There's a bunch of little tweaks that they could do. I'll just go ahead and list all of them briefly and then we can touch on them a little bit more in depth. But my list that they could do would be, improvements would be customizable win conditions, they could do customizable maps, customizable team sizes, customizable spawn locations, and then key buildings. So we can go over all of those. I guess maybe the first one to start off with would be the win conditions. Indy, I'll let you talk about that. Okay, so when you play free-for-all, there are a couple of ways you can win the game. Last man standing is probably the most common, but it can lead to some pretty wonky games. For example, if you're playing a free-for-all game where there are only three players, or an odd number of players, for instance, then whoever engages last is probably going to be the one to win. Last man standing, in and of itself, very fun game mode, definitely works very well when there's an even number of players, but as soon as, well, if it's, say, a 1v1v1v1, so four players, but it can get a little bit wonkier once you start getting an odd number of players. So last man standing is one type, and scored resolution is the other. And this is where you want to make a free-for-all a bit more fair, and effectively what scored resolution does is it takes into account what kind of units you killed, whether they were elite, and just the way you killed them, and that effectively, there's an algorithm that I don't understand at all, and it depends on what game it is, but basically the more elite stuff, and the more units you kill, the more points you get, and whoever has the most points at the end of the game will win. So say I engage last, but I have a full army left, and I only killed 200 guys, I'm probably not going to win, because I killed 200 peasants, nobody cares, whereas someone who engaged early on killed two dragons and a giant, they're going to be a lot more likely to win because a dragon and a giant will be worth a lot of points. Sam Millen in that interview explicitly said that they've done some tweaking with that algorithm to make it better. What that means compared to Medieval 2, I have absolutely no idea, but it sounds like scored resolution is going to be the default game mode for free-for-all. Whether we get last man standing, or other game modes, or win conditions, I am not sure yet, that has not been confirmed, but it's definitely a possibility. Yeah, I think I would love it if CA just kind of tries out a couple different options. It doesn't really matter too much if they're balanced. I would just like them to introduce more options for us and let the community decide kind of what's a favorite one. So off the top of my head, one of them could be literally embracing the fact that people like to lord snipe and make one of the things to win would be how many lords have you killed in this free-for-all? So they could literally make a gen sniping free-for-all game type where you just have to kill the most number of lords, or the beast slayer, or something like that. They could come out with a lot of little things like that that I think would be interesting and keep it fresh and leave it to the community to see what honor rules pop up and then use that to determine future ones and things of that nature. But I would love for them to kind of test with different win conditions. Well, yeah, and it's not just that. It's also what that could be done with in the modding community. So if CA allows modding in that aspect where you can customize your own win conditions on the back end with the modding tools, that could be gigantic because obviously people would be able to make some really crazy game modes out of that, and that could obviously go a long way in extending the life cycle of Total War Warhammer 2's multiplayer suite. So that could be a pretty big thing. One thing me and Oakley were talking about were key buildings, which were a feature in Total War Shogun 2. And basically what they did was there'd be, depending on the map, two or three or maybe one dojo on the map where if you stood in the circle of a certain radius from that dojo, you would get bonuses to your army if you controlled it for a certain amount of time. So we were discussing in a free-for-all game, say it's a four-person free-for-all, you might want people to avoid camping in a corner of the map and waiting until the other players have engaged. And so one way to do that is make or add a capture point or some kind of victory condition on a key building. So say there's an Aztec or Lizardmen temple in the middle of the city, or in the middle of a map, basically that's going to funnel everybody towards that location and make sure that every player is fighting for that because they don't want to lose out on those bonuses or whatever win condition is tied to that that would allow them to win the game. So key buildings could be a nice return to Total War Warhammer 2 and free-for-all battles in general. They can force people into doing certain things and they can allow you to fight over certain terrain features that normally, if they weren't on the map, players wouldn't necessarily want to fight over. So it could definitely change the flow of battle, which could be a very good thing. Yeah, and come to think of it, I think that is honestly the natural best third choice. The first one would be scored resolution, the second one would be elimination, and the third one would be capture points. And I think what they would do is either a single capture point, King of the Hill variant, or maybe it would be like musical chairs capture points where there's one fewer capture points than there are players, or something like that. So obviously everyone's going to scramble for the nearest capture point and try and sit on it, but you have to control the majority of them to win the game. Or each holding one takes up points over time, and the more capture points you control, the more points you take up. The first one to 100 wins, something like that, which would be kind of cool. But yeah, I don't want to get too deep, but there's a lot that they could potentially do. Another thing that we had noted here was team sizes, the ability to customize that. So we didn't get to ask that question, but obviously I think what they were implying was it's going to be 1v1v1v1. I would love for them, and I'm sure Indy would too, the ability to have different combinations, 2v2v2v2, or maybe a team of two, and then a bunch of teams of one, or things like that would be very interesting. Yeah, I don't know what they're going to do with the UI, right? Because in Medieval 2, when you wanted to do a free-for-all, there were four team slots. There was Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, and Team 4. And you basically just scrolled through, and that allowed you to pick which team you wanted to be on. Obviously since that point, we've had a UI that only allows for two teams, so you would basically just switch sides. I don't know if they're going to completely change the UI. I'm hoping they do, because what it means is, if we're allowed to do that, have four teams, is we can have eight players in a lobby, same as always, but it would then allow you to be two players on Team 1, two players on Team 2, two players on Team 3, two players on Team 4, and allow you to make those 2v2v2v2 free-for-alls and some other game types that you wouldn't normally be able to play. For instance, you could maybe make it so that there are three Skaven armies in a free-for-all, but they have less fun, so they get a more horde-style feel, and then the High Elves or the Lizardmen or some of the more elite-focused factions could then only have one player, but they have a more elite-style army and kind of role-play it that way. So there's a lot more you can do with multiplayer when there are four team slots. So, hopefully, that is going to be a feature that's added. Yes, I'm going to be very happy with just 1v1v1v1 free-for-all, but there's a lot more that can be added on top of that, very much hoping that it can be a four-team-slot kind of UI we're dealing with here. Yeah, and another thing just came to my mind, if they come up with different teams like that, you could get a very interesting scenario where everyone's on their own team, but then there's a central team that's all together that's a very big team, but the twist in this game type that I just came up with is that that other team that's really big would be AI-controlled, so you would have kind of like... And if it's a custom map, what you could call it is like the Savage Wilds, where kind of there's a map and it's a bunch of woodlands, and the AI army is literally just Beastmen armies that spawn everywhere, and so the players have to kind of survive against... It'd be like a survival game where you're running away from this Beastmen force that's running after you in the woods, but then also you might run into other players. That would be really cool. There's some absolutely insane stuff, and just thinking about Total War Warhammer 2, you could just make an army of a ton of feral dinosaurs. Yeah, exactly. A jungle map that you have to survive in. Yeah, they're basically just coming out of the woodland and attacking all players. It's basically Jurassic Park, but you've got a bunch of Warhammer armies fighting at the same time, so... Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff that could be done there. We'll have to see what CA has gone with. Hopefully it's more on the robust side of things, at least in terms of UI. Although, to be honest, that's not even getting very robust. That's pretty straightforward and simple. I don't know what the implementation's gonna be, but hopefully it suits our needs, I guess, is the way I would say. If CA rolls out with basic things, like even just the ability to change spawn locations and team sizes, leave the rest to the modders and us to come up with the ideas. Just give us the flexibility and people will come up with crazy stuff. I hope CA just gives us the potential to do it and outsources all the work to us. I would be perfectly happy with that arrangement. Absolutely. That's a lot of stuff that we've crammed into, but all of that is improving upon free-for-all, which is a toe in the water. But what Indy and I want to do in this last portion is talk about the bigger scope. What would be the eventual evolution of multiplayer? For us, I think that's some form of Avatar Conquest. If CA is gonna continue down the line of stepping it up in terms of tiers of complexity, Indy and I were brainstorming what would be the various tiers that they would introduce Avatar Conquest in. Again, I'm gonna start with a broad overview and then we can dive into this. I think what we discussed was if CA is gonna step up the tiers, it's gonna be what requires the least amount of work either for creating but also for balancing. The way I foresee this is the first tier would be Avatar Conquest where the unlocks are purely visual. The second one might be something where you don't unlock necessarily anything that we don't currently have, but what you do is you start gating certain things. For instance, right now we have lords who can unlock mounts. CA would just lock those mounts out. Same thing with spells and whatnot and have you grind out for them to unlock them, but it's nothing new. The balance is already there. The features are already there. They would just have to sequester them and have you unlock them over time. The third tier would be them full on allowing us to do Shogun 2 version which is where you almost create your own units. That's the overview. Indy, we can go into the details if you want. We can start out with just the basics which is if we believe that Avatar Conquest gets added sometime in game 3 which is what it seems like it's leaning towards or maybe sometime after the trilogy is over and they want to get a bit more money out of the series before it goes by the wayside or something, maybe we get an Avatar Conquest DLC. Of course, that is not even remotely confirmed. First, we have to support Free For All and that is going to be my first call to action in this video. We've been asking for Free For All for close to a decade now. We wanted it in Empire, we wanted it in Napoleon, and we wanted it in all those games that came after and finally we have it. We have to support multiplayer. We have to play this game mode. It's really important because if they go to the time and effort and energy to make Free For All and nobody plays it, they're not going to add any more features to multiplayer and obviously there is a decently sized multiplayer community that plays but an even bigger community that watches these videos. Pixelated Apollo, of course, getting 100,000 view videos left and right. It's obviously a big part of the Total War series whether some people want to admit it or not. Play Free For All. Support multiplayer. Support the game mode and there's going to be a lot more likelihood that more features get added in the future. Moving past that, what would happen if Avatar Conquest got added? Well, the first thing that we are thinking is the Army Painter. It's the most basic. It's the easiest thing for CA to implement in terms of Avatar Conquest. Give people the ability to change the colors of their units and personalize a bit. So if I want to name a Bestigor something, I can change his name around. I can change a generic Lord's name around, that kind of thing. Very basic level visual customization would be the first step and this is obviously something we've been asking for since Warhammer 1 was announced. Army Painter is a big deal in Warhammer. It's what the tabletop was. It was all about personalizing your armies and customizing them to your own specifications. If you want to have purple orcs, you should be able to do that. Obviously some people won't like that, but I think that most people that play multiplayer would love the option to have a Army Painter. And that's not even just multiplayer players. I think an Army Painter would be a great thing for single player as well. For those of you who want that kind of feature. So I think that's the first step. The second step I think we get into Lord and Hero customization in that you're then able to change their visuals so you could add a different kind of style helmet to Karl Franz if you wanted to. If you remember Shogun 2, you had a very robust suite where you could change their helmets, you could change their mempo mask, you could change their armor, and basically their entire style, what they look like. That would be a very cool thing. Obviously you'd want to keep the you might not be able to do it for Karl Franz because they have a very set aesthetic and style, but certainly for the traditional, like a just regular generic Glade Lord, or a black Orca General, something like that that could be definitely doable. And then the other side of that are stat changes. So Karl Franz for example has multiple magic items. He has the Reikland Runefang, he also has Galmoraz. You can choose which one you want to bring to the battlefield, and his model would change depending on which weapon you chose. So, the Reikland Runefang might be great for dueling and give him the duelist trait, and then whatever other stats it gives him in the tabletop, it'd kind of flesh that out and determine what kind of abilities that the Reikland Runefang would give him. Or you could bring Galmoraz, get a bunch more armor, piercing damage, blah blah blah, there's a bunch of different stat changes depending on which weapon you decide to bring. And the functionality behind that could literally be ripped straight out of campaign, where you're ranking up your lord by doing quests. So you're unlocking mounts, you're unlocking stat bonuses for your lord, different things like that. They could almost straight up rip it out of the campaign, I would think. Yeah, and there's a gigantic amount of magic items and weapons that are already in the game. There's obviously a pool of generic items that any legendary lord can get, and then there are the specific ones that you attach to specific legendary lords and heroes. So I think adding that kind- it doesn't have to be super robust, but adding that kind of feature where you're able to customize your lords and heroes to your own specifications before the game would be nice. Obviously we already have that to an extent in multiplayer. I'm thinking a bit more robust than that. But yeah, that's certainly something that CA could look into adding. And then the third would be a very robust avatar. Full Avatar Conquest experience. Oakley, what do you think that would entail if you were gonna go balls deep in this area for multiplayer? What would you want them to include? Yeah, so we talked about this a little bit before the video. So essentially the form that this would take would be, yes include the army painter and the visualization and all that, but allow you to really turn that Empire Swordsman unit into the Sons of Sigmar unit. You know, progress it down where you're equipping different color schemes on your guys, you're equipping different shields, swords. As you're teching your guys up, you can invest the experience into armor piercing, or magic damage, or maybe even unit size, or perhaps tack on musicians, people who buff your leadership, little things like that where you're really creating your own units, essentially in the form of regiments of renown. So that's what I would think, where you're creating essentially your own regiments of renown, very much a la Shogun 2. Throw on top of that a couple other things that they could do when you get to this full-on Avatar Conquest. Another thing they could do would be kind of, not just the units, but also what are you bringing for your army itself. So in Shogun 2 they had the different, I can't remember what they were called, but the battle cards essentially, that gives you kind of general... Retainers. Retainers, exactly. That gives you general stats for your army. I could easily see them implementing that for chaos, bring a certain mark of chaos that buffs all your troops. Or what they mentioned is that there's this thing that's a variant of magic, which applies to your whole army for Warhammer 2. It's essentially called Army Abilities and it's kind of, it allows you, it's basically got a global cooldown. You can use it only a certain amount of times and it does really cool stuff like, I think it was for Krokgar, he had the ability to raise cold ones anywhere on the battlefield. So that would be something that before the battle starts, you can unlock these things and bring them as your cards to enhance your army in the battle. And so people would be able to add that as another kind of dimension to the battlefield. So that's kind of what I envision. I think you and I had discussed balancing and the pitfalls of Shogun 2, so maybe we could get into some of that. Yeah, we'll get into that in a second. One thing I wanted to add was one thing that people have been asking for and is a big part of Warhammer tabletop are battle standard bearers and musicians. Oakley touched on the musician part of things. So yeah, being able to add something like a battle standard bearer, a specific specialized unit leader inside a unit could be a very cool addition to the game. Add something like a man-bane standard that reduces leadership by 6 or 8 in an AoE. Something like that. It just adds a lot more replayability. Being able to customize units and personalize them to your own specifications adds a ton of replayability and will bring players back. But one of the pitfalls of Shogun 2's Avatar Conquest, and this was certainly something that I've heard many people complain about that it turned the entire game mode off from them, was that there were some grindy and negative elements. So one of the big issues with Avatar Conquest was a lot of newer players felt like they didn't have the same chance of winning as their opponent. It wasn't just that they were more experienced at the game, it was that they had unlocked these powerful retainers and powerful stat boosts, melee attack, melee defense on their units. They felt like they couldn't necessarily compete with. So I think the grinding kind of needs to get thrown to the wayside. I loved the ideas of Shogun 2, but it was not perfect. Avatar Conquest was far from perfect in Shogun 2, so some ways they could change it was, for example, it would sometimes take 20 or 30 battles to get a unit to rank 9. It would take a very long time, a bunch of XP, to get them to that point where they had all of their upgrades unlocked. So one way they could get rid of that grind is by lowering that XP threshold substantially so that players only need to play maybe a handful of battles before they've maxed out a unit. Oakley and myself have kind of been toying with the idea of keeping it like it was in Shogun 2, where you take a point and put it into something specific, like melee attack or melee defense or charge bonus, or CA could go with a new kind of route, something that we're calling specialization, where a maxed out unit that has full XP picks a specific specialization that gives it fear, or gives it magical attacks, or gives it higher weapon damage, or something that specializes in, but you can't go for an all-around unit like some level 9 units were in Shogun 2, where you could get max attack, max defense, more charge bonus, and fear on top of that. The specialization might make it a little bit more balanced. Again, balance might be one of those things that's tough for CA to handle in Avatar Conquest, but when everyone has access to the same tools and it doesn't take a super long time for them to get there, then, yes, the meta's gonna develop, but everyone will have access to that same kind of meta, so it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for the game. Another thing about Shogun 2 that some people didn't like were the random drop retainers, and they were kind of an issue because some people felt like they never dropped any of those top tier retainers like World Wary or Blade Master. That gave them a bit of a disadvantage if they didn't have it before the game even started, and that's not a good feeling to go into a RTS game and know right off the bat, I'm at a disadvantage to my opponent, even if it wasn't necessarily a huge disadvantage, just knowing, yeah, I might lose because of that minus 3 melee attack or whatever. That could be kind of annoying, so CA could just have a huge bank of retainers and army abilities, those global abilities we already talked about, available to all players, and it might only take a handful of games, maybe 15 or 20, to unlock all of the retainers in that pool, so there's at least some sense of progression there, but there's not this gigantic learning or XP curve that prevents players from jumping in to the game mode in the beginning. With all that said, what else do you think might be a good implementation for Avatar Conquest Oakley? What else do you think they should add if we're going balls deep with Avatar Conquest? I'm not too sure about anything super new, but I think the incorporation of Regiments of Renown was something we were discussing, where I think Regiments of Renown would be a cool way for them to figure out balancing. So one of the things we were discussing is, okay, you have to do at least a little bit of a grind to create your own specialized units, which would be one route, and so say that would allow you to create, say you're going to upgrade Empire handgunners, you can create your own specialized handgunner unit by grinding it. So that's someone who plays a lot of multiplayer, it would take them, I don't know, maybe a dozen games to get the fully teched up guy, and that would allow you to craft a very specific version that has good reload rates and does flaming damage somehow. So in order to compete with that, the new player would just jump directly to using a Regiment of Renown unit, the Silver Bullets. It's also got better reload rate, better accuracy, but you're forced down a specialization where it does magical damage. So I think that's kind of a cool way where they could balance out the needs of a new player to have high tier specialized versions of units, versus someone who wants to grind out a little bit to get a slightly more niche role for their force. And one isn't necessarily that much better than the other, they're both more cost effective versions of something, but one gives you more control, but the other one is still pretty powerful and fills its own role. So I think that would be kind of a cool way to implement it. Those were just kind of my two cents on that. Yes. So at the end of the day, remember, this is Warhammer, and it's really important to make sure that all the armies and the factions, the unit rosters still feel like those factions. So you don't want Empire players carrying around a Beastmen man-bane standard or something like that, because that one, it contributes to a meta evolving where everyone's always picking the best stuff, which is going to happen anyway, but you don't want it where it's crossing over between factions. You don't want Vampire Counts players using Gelmoraz. Like, obviously, there has to be, it has to still feel like Warhammer, and you still want the units, and the lords, and the heroes, and the magical items they can bring to match up to that specific faction. But at the same time, with the specializations, and with the increasing of stats and stuff, you want to keep it relatively toned down. You don't want it to be a point where you're getting 80 charge bonus on an Empire Swordsman, right? Like, that would be really stupid. So, everything needs to just fit with the basic universe that has already been created with the multiplayer experience that's been created, but just give players a bit more options, a bit more personalization, a bit more customization that allows them to field an army the way they would like to field. Obviously, there are rules in Tabletop that help with that, and shifting the multiplayer suite and experience over to Tabletop a little bit more where there is that personalization, where there is that pre-game ability to change units around a bit, I think that would be an absolute boom for multiplayer. It would be fantastic and really add to the replayability that we'll have in Total War Warhammer 2 and the trilogy going forward. So, those are my thoughts, those are my hopes. I'm very much hoping that CA can get to a point where Avatar Conquest is feasible and where the community would love to support it show up and make sure that it becomes an ingrained part of the Total War series because, I mean, imagine in Total War Warhammer 3, we have all 16 major Warhammer fantasy battle races, and then we have Avatar Conquest and an army painter on top of that. Number one, that's a legendary series of games right there. That is some incredible feature and incredible multiplayer experience, but that could even then translate to Total War games in the future. If the community is rising up and supporting multiplayer and the YouTubers are making good content for it, that's going to help the entire community grow and foster that long-lived multiplayer experience that I think a lot of us would love to have. So, those are my thoughts, those are my hopes. I hope that can happen at some point. Yeah, and we've kind of towards the latter end of this video started to get our hopes and dreams up pretty high, but I think CA has shown a willingness to try and at least meet us halfway, and even if they only meet us a quarter of the way in this case for multiplayer, I think we outlined how even some bare-bones things when it comes to free-for-all and an army painter would still bring a lot of value to the table. So, yeah, I really expect good things from this whether or not we get the full suite or not, I think it's going to be very exciting nonetheless. So, yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed the video, and we'll talk to you later. IndiePride, signing out for now. See you guys. Bye-bye.